There is lots of info in my below YouTube video so make sure to watch it if you're interested in more details about my "Latest Workout Program"!

The Back Story:
I have been really trying out some different approaches to figuring out the best workout program for me. I have found from trial and error that a lot of frequency seems to work for me so the more often I hit a muscle group each week the better I seem to respond, well at least to a point...

A while back my training consisted of hitting each muscle group really hard at least once per week by doing multiple exercises on that body part day and practically beating the muscle to death. Did I see results? For sure but I found that I eventually hit a wall training this way and the other negative side to this infrequent way of training each muscle group, is how soar you will be in that body part and for a long time afterwards.

I then switched to hitting each body part twice per week and found that my muscles responded even better to this more frequent training and the DOMS (Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness) did not seem as bad, don't get me wrong there is always going to be some muscle soreness if you train hard.

Let's skip ahead to several months ago... I decided to train every body part every workout day which for me is five days per week. To do this you have to pick one exercise per muscle and do around 5-6 sets with a very high intensity to make sure that at the end of that exercise set you have complete fatigued and exhausted that muscle group completely. The next workout day you do the same but pick a different exercise for each muscle group than you did the previous before. This continues on each day so that at the end of the week you have done 5 different exercises for each muscle groups.

The problem I found with this is that my workouts where getting rather long, as much as 2 hours each and because of the super high intensity, it would effect the exercises at the end of the workout as I was mentally and physically too tired to give them 100% of my effort. I also found that the idea of coming into the gym to torture myself in this way was taking the fun out of my workouts and making me dread going to the gym at all.

So I backed my workout days down to 4 days per week hitting every muscle group every day and this was for sure better as I was able to take three days off each week taking some of the mental and physical strain off of me but to be honest I was still dreading the long workouts on my workout days which again took a lot of the fun out of training. So I decided to try something new yet again...

So here we are with My "Latest Workout Program"
I decided to go back to a 5 day per week program to shorten each workout a little bit to under 1.5 hours as I feel this is the sweet spot for me, anything longer and I lose focus and energy. I also decided to put my training focus on upper body one day and lower body the next day starting with upper body so I can hit it an extra day getting three upper body workouts in per week. I have found my legs do not need as much frequency as my upper body does and in general legs seem to take a little longer to recover than upper body for me.

I also decided to swap out arms on upper body day for calves, and on leg day I train arms instead of calves. I do this so that I have an exercise I can swap in to let my main body part recover a little before hitting it with the next exercise. For me training calves more often is beneficial and I find arms get a good workout while doing other main body part exercises so effectively I am kind of training arms every day this way.

Similarly to when I train every body part every day, I still focus all my energy into one single exercise for each body part on upper body day, on leg day I start with a compound movement and then follow that up with some leg extensions and leg curls. As a general rule I do about 6 sets for each exercise with the first three sets being more for warmup, my third set is getting very close to a working set but not fully. Sets four five and six are my working sets where I use my heaviest loads and try to go very close to failure on all of them with my last set making sure there is nothing left in that muscle. You could cut this down to four sets if you want to shorten your workout time down to around 45 minutes by making sets one and two your warmup sets and sets three and four your working sets.

Here is an example of a one week workout I would do:

Day 1 Upper Body Focus: 

• Dumbbell Shoulder Press (6 sets)
• Calf Raises Using Leg Press (6 sets)
• Wide Late Cable Pulldown (6 sets)
• Chest Flies using Universal (6 sets)
• Ab Crunches (2 power sets)

Day 2 Lower Body Focus:

• Box Squats (6 sets)
• Dumbbell Bicep Curls (6 sets)
• Leg Extensions (6 sets)
• Dumbbell Triceps Overhead Extensions (6 sets)
• Leg Curls Sitting (6 sets)
• DB Side Ab Raises (3 sets)

Day 3 Upper Body Focus: 

• Barbell Bench Press (6 sets)
• Seated Cable Back Row (6 sets)
• Misc Dumbbell Shoulder Raises (3x3x3 sets)
• Calf Raises (6 sets)
• Leg Lever Ab Raises (3 sets) 

Day 4 Lower Body Focus:

• Barbell Deadlifts (6 sets)
• Biceps Curls using Cable (6 sets)
• Leg Extensions (6 sets)
• Triceps Extensions using Cable (6 sets)
• Leg Curls Lying down (6 sets)
• Ab Roller (2 power sets)

Day 5 Upper Body Focus:

• Dumbbell Flies on Incline Bench (6 sets)
• Calf Raises (6 sets)
• Upright Rows using Cable (6 sets)
• Straight Arm Pull Downs (6 sets)
• Shoulder Shrugs (6 sets)
• Side Ab Twists using Functional Trainer (2 power sets)